Art: FULLER FUTURE

FOR years R. (for Richard) Buckminster Fuller has been the gadfly, delight and despair of the technological world. Beginning with a design for a ten-story apartment house that he hoped would be dropped from a Zeppelin on the North Pole, he designed projects ranging from a house that was hung from a duralumin mast to bathrooms with no running water (only an air hose squirting 90% air, 10% water, no soap needed). Among his other Dymaxion (“dynamic” plus “maximum service”) products have been a three-wheel, rear-engined automobile and a house that can be stowed away in an aluminum container. None of them ever went into mass production. Bucky got a reputation as a man of tomorrow for whom tomorrow never came.

Now, to the surprise of his many detractors, success has finally arrived for 63-year-old Bucky Fuller. His geodesic domes are popping up like mushrooms all over the surface of the globe. Essence of the geodesic dome is to frame a sphere (the greatest possible space with the least possible surface) with combinations of tetrahedrons (“the simplest finite system you can have”), making a lightweight, easily assembled structure of wide span and low cost.

Flying Domes. The U.S. Marine Corps tried geodesic domes made of paperboard, found them so light that a helicopter could lift them and fly them to advance bases, so cheap that they could be left behind if necessary when the troops moved on. (The Marine Corps nicknamed the disposable domes “Kleenex houses,” called them “the first major basic improvement in mobile military shelters in the past 2,600 years.”) The U.S. needed a trade fair building in Afghanistan that could be flown in by DC-4; Fuller provided one that could be assembled in 48 hours. Covered with polyester Fiberglas, geodesic domes proved just the thing for the DEW Line radomes. Says he, with the satisfaction of the man whose mousetrap has at last clicked: “The DEW Line radomes stretch from western Alaska to Baffin Island, and the Marine Corps has almost 1,000 domes in use, some in the Antarctic. North Pole, South Pole, I’m all around the world.”

Emphatically not an architect (“If anything, I’m a research department for architecture”), Bucky Fuller launched his war with traditional technology when he was bounced out of Harvard (in 1917). Bucky’s response was to develop his own brand of “synergetic and energetic geometry.” By 1927 he was consoling himself for industry’s indifference to his multiple schemes with the contention that it would take science 25 years to make his ideas feasible. He was about right. In 1952, after a quarter-century of living off lecture platforms, consultant fees and his friends, Fuller was approached by Ford

Motor Co. and asked to put up a dome to cover an exhibition rotunda in Dearborn. Visitors came, marveled, and soon the world was beating a path to Ducky’s door.

Fuller delights in the discomfiture of his critics. When a geodesic radome was being tested at M.I.T., he chortles, “their statistics showed it wouldn’t stand up in a 15 m.p.h. wind.” Fact is, radomes have stood up to blasts of 210 m.p.h.

And Submarine Islands. The man who removed Fuller forever from the world of “doodleometry” and put him into big-time construction was Henry Kaiser. Two years ago. Kaiser spotted a student model of a geodesic dome, ordered one for his Hawaiian Village. Since then, Kaiser’s sales department has sold six 145-ft. aluminum-covered domes, including one for a Fort Worth theater (see color). Equally enthusiastic, the Union Tank Car Co. this week is officially opening its mammoth-sized roundhouse in Baton Rouge, already has plans to erect another 384-ft.-diameter dome in Wood River, 111.

Bucky Fuller is now shooting for the moon, where he hopes to erect “discontinuous compression-tension integrity structures,” which might also serve as sky islands. Says he: “It’s a cinch. They don’t have to be dome-shaped. I could make them look like a dragon or a cuckoo bird, design an umbrella linear foldup that would make a tiny package.” Bucky’s other project: submarine islands. Predicts Fuller: “In our next half century a good deal of time will be spent along the bottom of the ocean, and when we go to the moon, they’ll need me. I’m quite confident that I have the technique necessary. But I just know Washington won’t come to me until they’re in trouble.”

Any day now, Bucky expects the telephone to ring.